Alice in Wonderland-Book Cover and Endpaper Design

•

This illustration represents both the books and the movies of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

When Alice was talking to her cat in the second book, she realized that her room in the mirror reflection was not the same as the one in real life. In the movie, Alice crawls through the mirror and entered the wonderland. In this illustration, the water represents the mirror. The Alice on the top is from Through the Looking Glass, where she slew the dragon Jabberwocky and cut off the head of the Queen of Hearts. The Alice in the reflection is the Alice in Wonderland, where she was still a kid. The reflection represents both her childhood and her loss of innocence.

The face on the bottom right corner belongs to the Cheshire cat. There is a theory that the Cheshire cat represents the consciousness of Alice since he was the only one who knows that Wonderland is imaginary, and he once told Alice that only when she becomes crazy can she stays in Wonderland. Therefore, he, in a way, is also the reflection of Alice, so he is facing Alice instead of the viewers. There are two different reflections of Alice in his eyes. One is Alice from her childhood, and the other one is her when she was a teenager, holding a sword in her hand.

The clock on the bottom left corner is facing the viewers. In the series, Clock and time are two of the very important elements. There are many references to time in the books, but there is no clear sense of time. Alice thought that she stayed in Wonderland for days or even weeks, yet when she returned to the real world, she realized that time had not changed at all. This also supports some theories that Wonderland is an imaginary world, that everything is not real, or even that Alice was on drug the whole time and imagined the Wonderland when she was high. I have heard about some illness, which when the patients draw clocks on paper, they think that the numbers they wrote are in order. However, those numbers would appear to be chaotic in other people's eyes, all squeezing up in one corner, just like the ones in this illustration.

Those kinds of illness are relative to the stories, where viewers will get different results when observing from different perspectives. Perhaps the clock seems normal to Alice, yet it looks distorted in our eyes, and the "time" is running out from the dial. Furthermore, in the movie of Through the Looking Glass, Alice was always being pushed and forced to slay the dragon because time is running out and she had to fulfill the prophecy in time. Here "time is running out" is a pun! Haha